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lol we recently had a reviewer go on how our floor was trashed and needs to be re done. All though the building is over 100 yrs. old and there is quite a few things that is original, the floor being one of them. Also it is against the law for us to do anything with it. I don't mind the fact he had poor service, (we do) or he didn't like the beer. But 3 paragraphs on the "historical" floor was just wrong.

Last weekend we had a person ask to make sure sure our seasonings had no msg in anything. They ordered a salad with soy sauce made in the dressing so we didn't send it out. You could hear them screaming at the waitress in the kitchen.

The line that always gets me is this food isn't authentic or real. Typically the review goes, I grew up or lived in, (Fill in country or state) and they would never, make, serve, anything like this. The best version I heard of this line came from a young lady in Mexico, who was trying to tell our group that tacos were not authentic Mexican food. We thought she meant hard shell tacos from the states, but no it was all tacos. In the end it turned out, the young lady was from Southern Mexico, and tacos were not common.

I have come to hate the word authentic, particularly in the context of food. I never use it. I usually say, "traditional" or "typical" and try to contextualize that to "home cooking" or a given region/time period/style/etc. Authentic has come to imply anything else is "fake" or "constructed"...instead of just different from what they are used to. Seeing this word in any review (well, nearly any context actually) will cause me to regard the entire review much more skeptically.

I may have a somewhat different point of view on this topic. I see Yelp and food bloggers as a necessary evil. I have little ability otherwise to determine where I should go to eat (without trying it of course). I'm poor so I don't want to waste my time and money. However, in my experience, Yelp reviews tend to be written by hipsters, and once a few good reviews come in the typical path is for the positive reviews to continue to pile on. Because they're hipsters, they hate all chain restaurants, even if the food is good. They also congregate around the restaurants that everybody else has already said are good. I'm often disappointed by the food I end up getting. I'm not talking about any real food reviewing or criticism. I'm just talking about food that isn't even that good.

As someone who works on the line myself, I do get irritated by reviews that focus too much on what is being done in the kitchen to the ingredients and/or what is or is not in the dish. I believe that reviews, if written, has to focus on the taste and overall appeal of the dish, and be free of personal preferences. If personal preferences are included, it has to be stated as such. I do write reviews on occasion but only if the meal was memorable, weather in positively or otherwise.

hope it is ok to continue this thead. I am not a foodie, I just like good food. And I think Top Chef and Iron Chef and related shows miss the point sometimes.
i am an old sailor, so i have had pizza in Naples, Gyros in Rhodes,Greece, Lau Lau in Honolulu. I have also gone 35 days when all that was served morning, noon and night was variations of ground beef and tomato sauce.
I don't eat out often. When I do, I want food that is better than what I cook at home. And I would like the basic stuff done right. Don't serve me 5 hour old baked potato or iceberg lettuce that is brown or gravy that tastes like it just came out of the can.
Something I have found is small restaurants run by people serving their native cuisine usually serve the best product.

From what I have been able to tell, most people who call themselves 'foodies' eat out all the time, and have no idea what it takes to actually cook something. We met a couple like that at a friend's house a couple weeks back. They had lots of 'atta boys' and critiques of numerous area restaurants, and had almost nothing to offer about what they cook themselves. It's kinda weird.

I don't care for the term 'foodie' any more, but it used to fine IMO. Foodie used to refer to people who were passionate about food (growing, cooking, eating) and now it often refers more to hipster restaurant goers. Before that it was 'gourmet' which no one uses anymore. All food-related names and words eventually 'go bad' once they become overused and misused. Farm-to-table used to mean something, but now it is a cliche -- though the concept of sourcing food directly from farms has merit. Molecular gastronomy had its day, and now is out of favor. Even basic terms like 'ingredients' are getting trivialized. If someone says, "Let the ingredients shine" one more time I am going to vomit in my mouth and then spit it at them. Even glorious bacon is becoming cliched. Every hack cook somehow feels they sound more intelligent and cool if they proclaim: "everything is better with bacon." Fcuk them. It is now quite easy to find dishes made much worse by bacon. It doesn't mean I don't love bacon (I do) and bacon often makes dishes better, but that is beside the point; it is becoming a food cliche and is now being used in ways that makes things worse.

So we are left to find substitutes and eventually we end up calling things differently and start the cycle all over again. With today's food entertainment industry in full swing, the shelf life for a catchy food concept or term is not very long -- as it quickly gets misused and adapted into some faux cooking show with crap happy 'cooks'. The velocity in which terms come and go now, seems to be quicker, and you could even see Bourdain struggling with terms in his last few seasons of No Reservations. After a while it seemed as if he just gave up and went back to calling people douche bags. That's ok by me. Foodies are douche bags, unless they are the foodies who like to seriously cook and own cool knives, then they are ok -- oh, but wait -- maybe they are using some knives that are no longer in style. I don't know anymore.